Three Martyrs

Please join with me in commemorating a group of three British Muslim martyrs. Seriously.

Haroon Jahan, Abdul Nasir, and Shazad Ali died Tuesday night in Birmingham’s impoverished Winson Green area. After two days of rioting, looting, and casual arson, mainly by black gangs, the local community despaired of seeking help from a police force that was not making the slightest effort to intervene to defend them. As the small businessmen and shopkeepers of the area, the local South Asian community had most to lose. Organizing from the local mosque, they dispatched groups of young volunteers to patrol the area. A speeding car hit a group of these community defenders, killing three. (The driver is charged with murder). The victims were classic hard-working immigrants, one a mechanic, another ran a car wash. In the words of one observer, “They lost their lives for other people, doing the job of the police. They weren’t standing outside a mosque, a temple, a synagogue or a church – they were standing outside shops where everybody goes. They were protecting the community as a whole.”

If you have been following media coverage of the British riots, you have seen a great many explanations of the violence, including such classic theories as urban deprivation, youth unemployment, and anger at police racism, and all have some substance. What has been fascinating this time round is to see how even the most mainstream liberal outlets – even the New York Times – have focused on the vicious hooliganism and criminality driving the mobs, how they are driven not by an inchoate rage against injustice but by strictly rational desires for high-class consumer goods. Some even remark on the growth of “feral” gangs of white people, black and white.

What has been lacking in all this coverage, though, is the simple fact that the state and the police have failed utterly in their most basic duty to provide law, order and security, the fundamental justification for the existence of state mechanism. If there is no security and no deterrence, then there is no reason whatever why people should not do exactly what they want, grab whatever goods they happen to desire and, presumably, carry out whatever property or sexual crimes appeal to them. For honest city dwellers in poor areas, the right to property has been repealed.

You may think that’s an exaggeration until you see exactly how London police in particular responded to the riots, literally ceding control of large areas of the city to mobs for whole nights. Presumably they are too busy studying their manuals on community relations actually to get their hands dirty. Senior officers are meanwhile too heavily engaged figuring out how to sell details of the victims’ sufferings to the news media for the usual bribes. Everyone knows that no punishment will be inflicted on even the tiny minority of rioters who happen to get arrested, with the exception of two or three high-profile offenders.

If anyone suggests actually using force to suppress mob violence, the official response is one of appalled horror. When citizens demanded that police used water cannon – highly effective and non-lethal – British Home Secretary Theresa May explained, as to a badly behaved child, “The way we police in Britain is not through use of water cannon. The way we police in Britain is through consent of communities.” (By the way, “communities” in this usage does not include people who obey the law: it is more or less synonymous with street gangs). Anyway, mainland British police don’t even have devices like water cannon: why on earth would they need them in London’s green and pleasant land? As riots and popular complaints mounted, the government finally conceded, and a news headline in today’s Daily Telegraph – too good to be parody – reads “Water Cannon Available At 24 Hours Notice” (“Excuse me, lads, can you hold on a while? The cannon will be here shortly”). Nobody, of course, is pointing out how differently the crisis would have developed in the US, where citizens would have access to firearms. How does that ”unhealthy American obsession with guns” look to you now?

So what do you do if the state no longer exists to provide its basic functions of public protection? We have in fact returned to the original world portrayed by Thomas Hobbes, who knew that “the state of men without civil society (which state may be called the state of nature) is nothing but a war of all against all; and that in that war, all have a right to all things.” To secure their safety in such an environment, people have to find alternative means of defense, and that is what they have been doing.

The most moving aspect of the recent British crisis has been the pictures of ordinary citizens who despair of the absent police and resort to their own means to defend their community. Overwhelmingly, the most active and effective groups have been Middle Eastern and Asian immigrants, who actually know from bitter experience how tenuous the state actually is, and who understand that they must rely on community and kin. Turks, Kurds and Sikhs have formed community defense groups that sometimes look more like militias than neighborhood watch groups, and the gangs, wisely, have learned to avoid those areas. If commercial life survives in the attacked areas, it will be entirely due to those defenders, whose contributions will be forgotten or maligned in the mendacious official reports that will appear in the coming months. All honor to those groups.

And that is why I say that Haroon Jahan and his friends were not just heroes but martyrs. They died for the cause of social order, and the safeguarding of life and property, the most basic human rights. May they rest in peace.

Let’s ask Sarah Brady and the Violence Policy Center and all the other gun controllers how gun control is working for law abiding people in London this week. Sarah Brady says constantly that law abiding people don’t need EVIL handguns or any guns at all for protection. Just call 911 and the police will protect you. Well Mrs. Brady how are those 911 calls working for those law abiding people in London this week? The store owners who lost their shops? The people who are homeless? As the article said the police as did the Los Angeles police ceded control of whole neighborhoods for entire nights to thugs and hoodlums who had clearly forfeited their unalienable rights as they rioted through the streets. Tell us Mrs. Brady why people in those neighborhoods don’t need arms for personal protection. Tell us again why they should just keep calling 911. You and other gun controllers have told us for DECADES that we need to be like Great Britain. Well THIS IS GREAT BRITAIN MADAM! And calling 911 doesn’t work. When you most need it IT NEVER WORKS AND WILL NEVER WORK. Once and for all, gun control doesn’t work. Any questions?

All of europe is abandoning and regretting multi-culturalism and immigration as nothing more than socialist plots to create a modern voting class version of indentured servitude.

Riots like these combined with high unemployment do more to close borders to immigration than anything…I would not be surprised to see emulation of the spanish model of expatriating non-brits to leave.

Gee a 10,000 looters with guns going against a few thousand regular citizens with guns. How could that not turn out as anything other than well?
Don’t think of the London police as being lax and passive. Think of it as an experiment in Libertarian deregulation.
“We have in fact returned to the original world portrayed by Thomas Hobbes, who knew that “the state of men without civil society (which state may be called the state of nature) is nothing but a war of all against all; and that in that war, all have a right to all things.”
The London riots are the same as the immoral actions of Wall Street that led to our economic collapse Men and women being allowed to act as their most primal and visceral wants desired unfettered by regulations and those who enforce the regulations.
Would the police act differently here. Perhaps the first night, then the professional moral outrage crowd would starting to to the stage and a wave of political correctness as extreme as the rioters themselves would descend like locusts.
Mankind is a primal violent Only when socialized into civility and good manners is it restrained.
However you have a societal culture that glorifies and exalts the stupid, inarticulate, and violent. Hedonism and rebellion against authority are celebrated as being real and edgy.
Look at the pop culture from from the 50s and 60s to today.
Who is more likely to riot and rage for the fun of it. A person internalizing the values of Leave it to Beaver and Lawrence Welk or a person raised on edgy violence porn and gangsta rap?
As well, the UK is experiencing what every multi-racial multi-cultural society experiences when it turns its back on socializing, assimilating, and integrating new citizens in a melting pot so that their loyalties, ideals, identity, and mores are identical to the superior society they emigrated to.
The Asian militias that this article champions will be the next crisis in the future.

I would take 10,000 armed looters (though I doubt they would all be armed) against a few thousand armed defenders any day of the week! Looting in London today during these riots is low risk -> moderate reward for the looters and very high risk -> very high reward for the defenders. To stop this paradigm, you have to change the risk assessment. By arming the protectors (and some of the looters) you change in to very high risk -> moderate reward for the looters and high risk -> very high reward for the protectors.

People will try and defend their livelihood in either case. Arming even both sides gives the defender the advantage in both the defensive position and the risk assessment.

BTW: Hobbes knew nothing, he postulated that man was nothing more than a viscous animal if not for control of the state. His logic was flawed at the foundation. This very story shows that it is the state that is animal and man that is civilized by nature. The three that died were protecting out of their own duty to their fellow man while the state looked out for itself. The looters also showed why groups of men are less civilized than any single man. This self encouragement of members of the group is what leads to looting and what leads to bad government. The individual actors loose their identity and take on the identity of the group, along with its sense of right and wrong.

If you want the slavery of Hobbes, go find a country without a constitutional limited government. Find a good king, dictator, or other suppressive government to limit your behavior. This country was founded on the ideas of Locke et al, which are quite contrasting to Hobbes’ trash. Though today’s US (and London BTW) are now Hobbes’ society not Locke’s, which is why we have these problems.

Also, using the the collapse of civility in the world governed by what Hobbes envisioned is hardly evidence that Locke was wrong. People will have to rediscover what freedom entails, namely responsibility for one’s self, before civility can return to society after Hobbes’ restraint fails.

@ spoilhunter: your description of Hobbes is not warranted, nor is it very accurate. To say that Hobbes “knew nothing” and thought man was “nothing more” than a vicious [sic] animal is not very clear (unless you actually meant to say that men are slimy, in which case he may have sometimes agreed with you). In any case, whenever someone grotesquely overstates a position, it is difficult for serious people to take them seriously.

You must remember that for Hobbes the civil covenant was a product of reason, and actually had a moral foundation. Indeed, Hobbes was in many respects the first liberal (he grounded the contract upon the right of nature), and was a precursor of Enlightenment thinking. Locke, though different, was in many respects simply a progression of Hobbes’ presumptions (although Locke himself would not admit it).

The same insularity that has resulted in these Muslim militias leads to things like Asian grooming, refusal to hire anyone but their kinfolk or ethnic kin, and itself has contributed to the breakdown of British society. These three were protecting their own livelihood — great, but no cause for a medal.

And the failure of the British establishment to deal harshly with criminals like Tony Blair and Rupert Murdoch has said to thugs very clearly: “It’s okay. Law and order don’t matter. If you can get away with it, just do it!”

The actions of the looters are deplorable, but the fish rots from the head down, and when we see criminals like Blair and Murdoch feted and even honored in Britain, however can one expect and demand without hypocrisy for hoodlums and thugs to follow the law????

This is actually how most of the world operates. People side with others from their same religion, race, ethnicity and tribe. This is why when the Bosnian wars broke out you saw Arab Muslim volunteers fighting for the Muslim Bosniaks and Orthodox Christian volunteers from Russia, Greece and elsewhere fighting for the Orthodox Serbs. There were probably Roman Catholic volunteers fighting for the Catholic Croats. When push comes to shove people generally identify with people who are most like them especially when we are talking about sectarian conflicts whether they be Catholic vs. Protestant or Sunni vs. Shia and even more so when there is both a religious, cultural and linguistic divide between two groups in conflict such as with the Jewish Israelis and Muslim (and some Christian) Palestinians.

What we see now is that when the State has utterly failed its forced consituents, that ordinary citizens working in their own interest are completely capable of taking up the slack. I say cheers to those who don’t wait for a useless Government to respond! If citizens, rather than police, are capable of protection, than I say to hell with the State in general!

If the commercial insurance does not cover business loses do to riot or civil disobedience.the police were probably told to stand back. If my memory serves me, something similar happened in Chicago a number of years ago after a winning basketball game. Massive looting and vandalism took place in the downtown area. If the police even showed up, they just stood at a distance and watched! Why? Chicago police are not PC wimps. Relatives who life in the area told me big shot (so called).real estate developers wanted to take over those properties and told the mayor to tell the police to back off,or no donations for the next election! So there you go!

Guns are not the main issue of the London riots. The Japanese didn’t riot and loot after their earth quake, the Haitians did, so did the “Americans” who lived in New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina.

Swedish people living in their virtually all Swedish country, with high taxes, few gun rights and an all encompassing Swedish welfare state from the 1960s through the mid 1980s – Sweden had few or any problems with rioting and looting then.

London’s problems are people problems. And English people in Merry Old England are now paying a terrible price for the British establishments decision to replace the English people in England with other peoples.